Why are there so few records of Jesus?

One of the arguments that atheists use is that Jesus may not have existed, and no one can really prove otherwise. Obviously because Jesus didn’t exist, then this means that the Christian religion itself is based on an obvious lie. Although this is a specious argument, the religion isn’t dependent on Jesus after all but what lies in the books making the idea of a messiah on Earth superfluous, it is something that needs to be addressed. There are several reasons for this historical omission, and atheists tend to forget about them, even if those reasons back their case.

The biggest problem is that Jerusalem was considered the armpit of the Roman Empire. Although you have various Christian historians listing Jerusalem as the center of learning, the sad reality is that Jerusalem at the time of the Roman occupation was a hive of rebellion; the forests all around Israel were being cut down in order to provide wood for crucifixes, and Jesus himself no doubt made money from building crucifixes. It would be considered the same as any strange foreign area today; you expect weird stories from there and, while you note them, you tend to ignore the stories over the long haul.

There is also how histories were written at the time. Although there were annual reports done, most of the histories were written well after the fact. The idea was that if you write the history too soon after it happened, the passions of those involved would interfere with the proper writing of the history, making it less than objective. The solution to this was to simply wait a generation or two to insure that the passions had died and that the event was of actual historical interest. This is why none of the gospels were written until well into the first and second centuries.

There was yet another complication: Jesus was not the only messiah at the time. Keep in mind that Pontius Pilate was not there on vacation; he was there to get and then keep the Israelites in line. As such, there were numerous messiahs in town preaching that the Roman occupation would soon be over, and that God would soon take His promised people home. As such, if someone was preaching a messianic message, he would melt into the crowd.

So, summing up: From a historian’s perspective, Jesus was just another messiah living in the armpit of the Empire, and the event was not important to any of the historians living in Rome at the time. By the time the records were written, it would have mattered only to the growing cult of Christianity. As such, the historical mentions of it are limited to footnotes and what we would blind items today. You can find records of Jesus here and there, but they are practically hidden away. Ergo, the likelihood of finding those mentions is pretty miraculous in and of itself.